This memes war

Here's three panels from a strip on The Nib by Matt Lubchansky.  The rest of the strip is here.

Do you know what you know?

BuzzFeed gives a great video about issues that can arise from casual geographic education:

Dog's world

One of the slides in this animated GIF slideshow from College Humor shows how dog's think of the planet:

Introducing Camp Weedonwantcha

Camp Weedonwantcha, by Katie Rice is a brilliant little webcomic about a batch of kids stranded at an endless summer camp.  It would appear that they may be starting a new map-based story arc.

Spidey tracker

Did you know that Spiderman encountered GPS tracking devices in 1977? Well, ok, it was actually an "electronic radar device".  Still, what a nifty idea! Maybe that's how Spiderman figured out how to make a tracking device better than GPS.

Even More Historical Caricatures!

During some research, I came across a collection of caricature anthologies that feature "great men" from various geographic areas. Many of the caricatures from these collections included globes.

Here we have John B. Murphy on page 101 of Chicagoans As We See 'Em, circa 1904:

- Amanda Murphyao

GPS the bears

Jack Elrod's Mark Trail recently mentions GPS in a Sunday strip that serves up some rather alarming information about bears.  

Colored orientation

This is a bunch of city maps by Stephen Von Worley showing streets colored according to orientation:

San Francisco

London

Tokyo

New York

Möbius GPS

A New Yorker cartoon by Michael Maslin

International Breakfast

What happens when a bunch of Yankee kids are asked to try out breakfast foods from around the world? The folks at Cut Video decided to find out.

Dungeon projection

Redditor silverlight used a video projector to make an impresseive D&D gameplay experience

Five Oceans (not to be confused with Seven Seas)

Friend-of-blog Susan has contributed this item that was new information for me: The Southern Ocean is the world's 5th ocean, where previously there had only been 4 defined, and it was only officially defined by the International Hydrographic Organization in 2000.

I already knew about the 5 oceans, but I hadn't realized The Southern Ocean's designation was so recent.  I'll admit that when I was smaller I was very confused about mentions of The Seven Seas in pirate stories and my inability to match that with an equal number of oceans on the National Geographic world map that was in our family's dining room. Then I figured that The Seven Seas weren't referring to oceans, but rather to smaller bodies of water that Pirates frequented in the Golden Age of piracy... but I never bothered to learn what those Seven Seas were supposed to be.

Turns out that's not right either.  The Seven Seas did, in fact, refer to all the world's oceans... as they were known as early as Ancient Sumeria some 4300 years ago.  The number 7 of them was used to match up with astrology, there being 7 known planets (until somebody found Neptune in the 1700s).

Medieval Arabian literature identifies the Seven Seas as the Persian Gulf ("Sea of Fars"), the Gulf of Aden ("Sea of Larwi"), the Bay of Bengal ("Sea of Harkand"), the Strait of Malacca ("Sea of Kalah"), the Singapore Strait ("Sea of Salahit"), the Gulf of Thailand ("Sea of Kardanj"), and the South China Sea ("Sea of Sanji").

But Medieval Arabian literature also referenced other Seven Seas:
The Black Sea
The Caspian Sea
The Arabian Sea
The Indian Ocean
The Red Sea
The Mediterranean Sea
The Adriatic Sea

Medieval European literature referenced a somewhat different list of Seven Seas:

The Adriatic Sea

The Mediterranean Sea, including its marginal seas, notably the Aegean Sea.

The Black Sea

The Caspian Sea

The Persian Gulf

The Arabian Sea (which is part of the Indian Ocean)

The Red Sea, including the closed Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee

And sometimes the list included a few others:

The Atlantic Ocean

The Aegean Sea

The Indian Ocean

The North Sea

So the Seven Seas hasn't had much significance for several hundred years at least.

First Partition of Poland

I could've sworn this one has shown up on the blog before, but I can't find it when Amanda sent it to me.  This is The Allegory of the First Partition of Poland by Noël Le Mire:

It's after The Troelfth Cake, a 1773 French allegory by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune and there have been a number of versions of this rather iconic early political cartoon:

Artist is unknown on this one which was in British papers.

Clean out the fridge!

Last month we had a comic from Twistedspeedo by Henrik Tomenius.  Here's another:

Cupid's weather map

Here's a map and a poem from 1907

Don't mess with it

Well of course that's what the biggest BBQ in the world is going to look like:

GPS is wrong

We've seen signs like this before.  GPS needs some work in some places:

And in weather, iron boils

This is what you do when your weather map goes into open rebellion:

Directionally challenged

A while ago Buzzfeed had a listicle about 25 problems all directionally-challenged people can relate to (click for the full list).  Even some of us directionally-taleneted can relate to some of these.

5. When not being able to find your car in the parking lot becomes a regular occurrence.

More Historical Caricatures!

During some recent research, I came across a collection of caricature anthologies that feature "great men" from various geographic areas. Many of the caricatures from these collections included globes.

Here we have T. P. Cook and E. J. Nally on page 73 of Chicagoans As We See 'Em, circa 1904:

(The image was a bit blurry so I tried to get cleaner shots of the globes.)

- Amanda Murphyao 

Sea monster sculptures

So remember the post we did a while ago about Olaus Magnus’ 1539 Carta Marina, that alsmot iconic maps of the world that featured crazy sea monsters? Artist Bailey Henderson has made some sculptures out of some of those:

Open Street Maps clothes

Do you need an article of clothing that shows a location that you like?  Monochrome will produce exactly that for you from Open Street Maps data

View from Above game

This is probably just a marketing gimmick, but it's kinda fun to play the game: look at the aerial photo and guess where it is on the planet.

Chip and stans

I want to give kudos to Hi & Lois for a geography joke... but there are, in fact, only the five ex-Soviet Central Asian countries Chip mentioned... although how a typical US high school student would even be asked this, much less know it, is far fetched.... except that Chip was studying for this moment back in 2009.    Maybe she has a 25-year-old paper map on the wall and the students are looking up more current geographic info on the interwebs? If she's looking for Armenia or Azerbaijan she's got to take both, not just the one... and seriously consider Georgia.  If she's just punking them then it's a lame punk.  

Instagram

Remember last week's massive snow storm? Joe Dator had a New Yorker comic about it.

Seward's Folly

Considering that Alaska wasn't even a US territory at the time, this is an impressively wrong factoid.

More Historical Caricatures!

During some recent research, I came across a collection of caricature anthologies that feature "great men" from various geographic areas. Many of the caricatures from these collections included globes.

Here we have M.J. Carpenter on page 23 of Chicagoans As We See 'Em, circa 1904:

- Amanda Murphyao

Morning news

I try very hard not to expose myself to TV news, and morning news shows seem to be an especially virulently vapid flavor of the form. Still, I suspect that this assessment by Francesco Marciuliano's Medium Large strip of the typical morning show's daily descent into aggressive idiocy is accurate.  I'd ask if anybody out there can verify, but I'd worry too much for your mental health if you can/did.